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9th Annual Boston Underground Film Festival runs March 22-25 
E-MAIL DANIEL BERMANCAMBRIDGE, MA— The Ninth Annual Boston Underground Film Festival (BUFF IX) gets underway March 22-25, at the Brattle Theater (40 Brattle Street) and AMC Harvard Square Cinema (10 Church Street), but those who are anxious for a taste of this year’s line-up can attend a free party at Good Vibrations in Brookline ( on Thursday, March 15, where they’ll have an opportunity to get a sneak peek a the festival’s highlights. New to the festival is the presentation of the first ever "Dewey Award" for Excellence in Wordsmithing created especially for the Boston Underground Film Festival by Dewar’s Scotch Whisky and given to the most outstanding quotation or saying from a film. The winner receives $5,000, an Apple MacBook Pro loaded with the Final Cut Pro production suite, and a contract to produce a film for The Dewar's Collective, a fund created by Dewar's Scotch Whiskey to support local arts (music, theater, film, writers, etc). The winner will be announced on Saturday, March 24, at the Dewey Reception, starting at 10 PM at the Regatta Bar at the Charles Hotel (One Bennett Street, Cambridge). Admission is $10, which includes food and Dewar’s cocktails. The festival opens Thursday, March 22, with Benjamin Meade’s American Stag, a documentary that examines the "stag" film not just as a subject matter or for its lack of production values, but as a metaphor and reflection of American popular culture (initially shot on 35mm film, the advent of 16mm and 8mm consumer film stock allowed for production of about 1,000 of these films between 1915 and 1968). The film features footage from the largest private "stag" film collection (Meade’s) in North America, as well as interviews with film director Melvin Van Peebles, Film Threat founder Chris Gore, Tommy Chong, and more. Meade will introduce the film and lead a discussion after the screening. The Alloy Orchestra, which scored the film, will also provide live musical accompaniment for a short selection of silent stag films preceding the film; a nine-minute short co-directed by Emerson College alum Elza Kephart, Beyond the Pearly Gates of Ill Repute, will accompany it. The festival closes Sunday, March 25, with the New England premiere of Angela Bettis’s Roman. Scripted by and starring May director Lucky McKee, the film tells the story of a lonely man and his horrifically unlucky love life. Roman is a companion piece to May, which starred Bettis and Jeremy Sisto. Nectar Rose (Serenity), and Kristin Bell (Veronica Mars) also star. Bettis, McKee, Rose and cinematographer/editor Kevin Ford will be present at the screening. The other featured films include: • The Third Eye, an intense thriller about a woman who is trying to uncover the mystery of her brother’s death by trepanation, or drilling a hole in one’s head (Friday, 3/23 at 3:30 PM, Brattle) • Emerson graduate Sean Meredith’s (present at screening) Dante’s Inferno, a subversive, darkly satirical update of the original 14th century literary classic, featuring the voice of Dermot Mulroney and co-written by award-winning political satirist and puppeteer Paul Zaloom. Retold with intricately hand-drawn paper puppets and miniature sets, without the use of CGI effects (Friday, 3/23, 7:30 PM, Brattle) • New York based, Boston-bred radical queer filmmaker Todd Verow’s (present at screening) Bulldog In the Whitehouse, an outrageous take on the Bush administration, inspired by Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Friday, 3/23, 9:30 PM, Harvard Square) • Montreal filmmaker Francois Miron’s (present at screening) The 4th Life, a surreal thriller evocative of David Lynch (Friday, 3/23, 9:45 PM, Brattle) • Urban Explorers, a documentary by Melody Gilbert (present at screening) about the growing subculture of adventure seekers who explore abandoned buildings, sewers, sewers, and subways (Saturday, 3/24, 5:15 PM, Harvard Square) • The father of Canadian independent filmmaking, Larry Kent’s (present at screening), The Hamster Cage, his first film since 1992, focusing on a dysfunctional family get-together complete with murder, incest, and repressed childhood trauma (Saturday, 3/24, 7:15 PM, Brattle) • Anna Biller’s (present at screening) Viva, in which a suburban housewife in 1972 goes out to find herself in the middle of the Playboy-era sexual revolution, in a tribute to vintage sexploitation films (Saturday, 3/24, 9:15 PM, Brattle) • Fatality, a Russian thriller on the order of Sin City with bad translation, by noted music video director Vladimir Maslakov (Saturday, 3/24 ,9:30 PM, Harvard Square) • The notorious Japanese “pink film” The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai, about a prostitute with a bullet in her brain and George W. Bush’s cloned finger in her purse (Saturday, 3/24, midnight, Brattle) • El Presidente, a punk rock, gay wrestling comedy featuring the Lucha Libre wrestlers of Incredibly Strange Wrestling, followed by a live wrestling match between the Boston League of Women Wrestlers (B.L.O.W.W.) and La Gata Negra (Sunday, 3/25, 3:30 PM, Brattle) A number of short film programs fill out the festival including: • Midnight Transgressions: the most transgressive, hard-to-watch films (Fri., 3/23, midnight, Brattle) • Free Speech Zone: short films about global warming, corporate greed, torture, the war in Iraq, and other political subjects (Sat., 3/24, 12:30 PM, Brattle) • Blasphemous Rumors: shorts dealing with moral/religious issues (Sat., 3/24, 2:30 PM, Harvard Sq.) • Small Gauge Trauma: a collection of short films about torture curated by noted filmmaker and Fantasia programmer Mitch Davis (Sat., 3/24, 5:00 PM, Brattle) • Distress Management: short horror flicks (Sat., 3/24, 7:30 PM, Harvard Sq.) • Laughing Wild: A program of very short experimental bizarre comedies (Sun., 3/25, 1:45 PM, Brattle) Besides the Dewar’s reception, festival parties include: Opening Night at the Hong Kong Restaurant (1238 Mass. Avenue, Cambridge) at 10:00 PM featuring DJ Brother Cleve and the Black Cat Burlesque ($15 admission includes food and Harpoon Ale); the Visual Landscapes party featuring an hour-long program of short experimental films at Tommy Doyle’s (96 Winthrop Street, Cambridge) on Friday, March 23, at 9:00 PM ($10 admission includes food and Dewar’s cocktails); and the Awards Ceremony at Z Square (14 JFK Street, Cambridge) on Sunday at 10:00 PM ($10 admission includes food and Harpoon Ale where “best of” prizes in the form of Bacchus, a vibrating black bunny statuette, will be awarded in the following categories: Best of Fest (feature and short), most effectively offensive (feature and short), audience award, and Director’s Choice (feature and short). Festival passes are $50, which includes admission to all films and parties, as well as the pass-holders’ lounge at 42 Brattle Street (next door to the Brattle Theatre) from 12-4 on Saturday and Sunday. All individual screening tickets are $5 and can be online at www.bostonunderground.org. Tickets can also be purchased at the Brattle and Harvard Square Theater box offices on the day of the show. Founded in 1999 by veteran film curator David Kleiler, the Boston Underground Film Festival features films that celebrate an alternative vision and sound, offering a platform for filmmakers that encourages new work and ideas and pushes the envelope in style and content. “With conventional film festivals increasingly becoming just a way for distributors to promote their films, this festival is more about the art of filmmaking and provides a forum for filmmakers with an alternative vision to connect with one another and share ideas,” says Executive Director Anna Feder. Festival sponsors include Dewar’s, and Phoenix Communications (gold level); American Apparel (silver level); St. Aire Productions, Good Vibrations, the Charles Hotel, Mimobot, and Harpoon Ale (supporting); and Newbury Comics, the Canadian Consulate, Synapse Films, NEFilm.com and Black Ocean (contributing). For more information, including a complete schedule, venue directions, parking information, and more extensive descriptions of individual films, visit www.bostonunderground.org or www.myspace.com/bostonunderground or contact the festival office at info@bostonunderground.org or (617) 202-5059. Click here to comment on this article or post your own thoughts. © TheWorldJournal.com |
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